Spaces
Ah!
Let me die doing—
neither dreaming of what may be,
nor remembering;
neither foretelling,
nor recalling
the life lived by a long-ago me.
Oh!
The traumas—
the treacherous paths
negotiated in terror, yet
finished in triumph.
I
honor them.
I honor my efforts—
they formed the now-me.
But I lay them to rest,
those tales of courage
those soft songs of success.
Let others visit them—
through my poetry, perhaps;
or prosy blog of some sort.
But
even this, this very poem—
written today
outdoors, on a picnic bench
somewhere on Hawthorne,
will be history when I close my book.
My
former writings surprise me—
“Did I write that?”
And, bemused,
I try to put myself in that space.
I fail.
With the best of will,
I cannot fit in
those too-small spaces,
let alone be sent there
unwilling
by a cold bureaucracy.
JJH
July 14, 2010
P.S. I’ve put other poems on a page called “Poems by the Broc.” That’s where I’d like to put this one, too, but apparently folks aren’t getting the notices when I post on the other page.
